


Nameless

by ruff_ethereal



Series: Two To Get In Trouble [3]
Category: Descendants (2015)
Genre: Absent Parents, Gang Violence, Gen, Letters, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-05-03 16:41:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5298680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruff_ethereal/pseuds/ruff_ethereal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tale about a man trying to reconnect with his daughter, through a letter explaining why he had let her be raised by Maleficent for the past sixteen years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nameless

**Author's Note:**

> In case it wasn't obvious, this is Mal's father.

_Dear Mal,_

_You know me by many names, but I'm pretty sure the one your mother used most often was “He Who Shall Not Be Named.”_

_Yes, I am your father._

_No, this is not a joke._

_Yes, I have been gone from your life for all sixteen years, and I offer no excuse, no asking for forgiveness, no promises that I can somehow make it up to you after all this time—because as we both know, there is no making up for letting you be raised alone by someone like your mother._

_If you're still reading this letter and you haven't a) torn it to shreds, b) set it on fire, or c) vaporized it with your magic, I'd like to offer you an explanation of why I was never in your life until now._

_And before anything else, no, I am not trying to guilt trip you into letting me into Auradon. Trust me, with the things you're (hopefully) about to read, you'll know why I more than deserve to be on the Isle of the Lost._

_To start things off, let me tell you about who I was, before the Great Uniting:_

_I was an assassin._

_If there was someone who needed to be killed for revenge, greed, or love; if there was a person that was gumming up a certain powerful someone's plans too much; if there was some person or group making too many disruptive waves in a system, or they wanted me to help topple said system by (figuratively or literally) beheading it, I was their man._

_I've killed many people in my career. I don't know how many. And I'm not proud of what I've done, even if some of them made it extremely easy to murder them._

_I offer no excuse for my having been a monster. I could say I lead a hard life and society pushed me to become what I was, but then, I look at someone like you and your friends, and I see that it's not just the world that makes someone who they are._

_So it was that when the newly created Auradon guards started knocking down doors and paying visits to jail cells, castle dungeons, and brigs everywhere, I held out my hands, let them chain me, and load me up into one of those boats._

_You can probably imagine just what it was like to have been packed in like sardines with the likes of trolls, hyenas, and lowlifes who spent too much time hanging around dumpsters. And though you think you can also imagine just how bad the Isle was then, think again:_

_Hard as it is to believe, it was actually much, much, much worse when we first arrived._

_All people ever remembered were the big names—Shan Yu, Clayton, Maleficent especially—but most of the population of the Isle was composed of all the non-human and human minions and lesser villains: the thugs, tricksters, and thieves, and a small but significant number of them mafia bosses, warlords from China or neighbouring countries, the lords of the barbarian hordes roaming all over Agrabah, and so on so forth._

_Back then, Maleficent didn't have the total control of the Isle she has now with her army of brutes and spies._

_Back then, there was no established government, police, or representatives from Auradon to help keep things together, because none of the people of Auradon wanted anything more to do with us aside from shipping us off on those boats and helping put up the barrier._

_Back then, there was a power vacuum, and as you might have learned from Evil History class over at Dragon Hall, where there is a power vacuum, there will be people trying to fill it._

_And try to fill it they did._

_Violence was rampant on the Isle. Lords, dons, and the occasional opportunistic minion decided to rebuild or create their armies, and wage war on pretty much everyone and anyone, for reasons of power, land, or as supplies started to get low and the trash barges had yet to start coming in, food to keep on going another day._

_Death and murder was a fact of life back then. It was considered an odd day when you didn't run into a corpse left bleeding out on the street or left there for a while, and several enterprising individuals made quite the killing asking people to pay them for getting rid of the bodies because they were starting to make everything smell even worse that it usually did._

_True to form, they usually just traded wagons and dumped the corpses right back onto the streets, and made a killing faking killings, until the ruse caught up with them and most of them the ended up on their own wagons by the vengeful patrons._

_It was a violent, dangerous time, just all out war on the streets, and so help you if you were an “innocent” who was just trying to make it from day to day._

_Most of said power players disappeared, were killed, or forced into submission within the first month. Unfortunately, instead of being a solution to the problem, it only ended up making it even worse, with the survivors being the smarter, more resourceful, and more persuasive of the bad apples, who then quickly swooped into the ashes and ruins, and made themselves that much more powerful._

_As you might expect, none of this sat well with Maleficent, especially because she herself was frequently a target, and watching her back sapped out a lot of energy that could have been better spent forging her armies, or managing the Bargain Castle. She hated the fact that she was just a bishop on the bloody chessboard that was the Isle's power struggle, and that she had no pawns or methods to gain a serious advantage over everyone else._

_Until I went shopping for a new cloak at the Castle and things took a dramatic turn for her, for me, and for the history of the entire Isle._

_Someone decided an upfront attack was in order—and seeing as everyone had long run out of the bullets they'd smuggled onto the Isle, and magic was neutralized, the weapons of the day were your bare hands or whatever you could scrounge up and weaponize._

_The raiders' mistake was terrorizing the customers first just to piss off Maleficent before they came for her._

_My mistake was saving her from the raiders._

_Maleficent saw in me an opportunity: a trump card, a rook for the queen, someone who could help her get back to her former glory._

_I saw an opportunity in her, too: an easy, simple way to get my stomach filled, some valuables in my pocket, and have a nice, dry, relatively safe place to camp out at night._

_I took jobs from her constantly, taking out key targets, neutralizing threats, or just terrorizing the populace to keep them in check and remind them that Maleficent was back. Eventually, through a mix of hearsay, connections, and my own investigating, I managed to hook up with someone who provided me with a lot of tricks, traps, and weapons to help turn the tide even more._

_You'd be surprised at how easily you can weaponize mundane objects, and how lethally effective they can be. I never thought it was possible to kill someone with a teddy bear, but it turns out, all you needed was the right tools and a particularly resourceful and creative genius to make them for you._

_Things changed dramatically over the next couple of months. Some days, the Isle literally changed overnight, with one group of gangs about to wage all out war on the streets again one day, and the next, all of them were found dead in their headquarters._

_No guesses as to whose hands were stained with their blood._

_Maleficent started recruiting aggressively, building up her forces, using resources, intel, and intimidation to grow her influence and successfully wage war on those that couldn't be persuaded to surrender. All the while, I kept on taking out important targets, backing up her threats, or just outright knocking on their door with a trenchcoat full of weapons._

_Pretty soon, she had the whole Isle under her control, with her regular patrol of brutes as you know it, and her extensive network of spies to make sure that everything stayed that way. You could say things were going pretty great for her._

_It was for me, too, up until she ran out of targets she needed dead and people who wanted to challenge her. Then, the trouble started._

_Suddenly, she had no more reason to keep me around: I'd done my job, served my part in her plans, and now she had no more use of me._

_I had thought this would be when she would let me go, kill me, or otherwise banish me to someplace far away where she could find me again should the need ever arise, but it turns out, she needed one more thing from me._

_I'll spare you all the details I'm pretty sure you don't want to hear. All you need to know was that as soon as she knew she was pregnant with you, I got kicked out, “banished forever” to quote her, and warned never to talk to her ever again, and stay away from you, for fear of “corrupting” you with my “human weakness.”_

_I didn't challenge her—she had grown too powerful, I didn't have any intention of taking her place or bringing back the anarchy, and back then, I wasn't really the type to have wanted a kid in the first place. (Yes, I was using her as much as she was using me, but in my defense, being on the Isle seriously lowers your standards—just ask your friend Carlos' dad.)_

_My life was safe—Maleficent knew my capabilities and didn't deem me that much of a threat to merit the effort needed to take me down—but I was left with a different problem:_

_I was jobless._

_I spent some time trying to find my usual work, but it seems that no one needed anyone dead anymore, especially since many of the people that would have hired me a few years back had now gone into the Isle's unique brand of semi-legitimate business, mellowed out quite a bit, and/or understood that fighting Maleficent was bound to end in failure and a shallow grave._

_I starved for a while, until finally, I found a new job, and a new calling in life: painting._

_It seemed that these hands that were trained for so long to kill and fight are as good for wielding a brush as well as a knife. And lucky for me, lots of people on the Isle were still vain enough to want to have their portraits painted, of course with a lot of artistic liberty on my part._

_Yeah, an assassin to an artist. You might have called it poetic, but I just called it how I was going to survive._

_Painting changed me. Forced me to slow down, stop thinking in terms of who was going to want someone dead and could pay me for it, and as cliché and cheesy as it sounds, it gave me an appreciation for life, in all its beauty and (more often than not on the Isle) its ugliness._

_Sometime between Maleficent firing me and now, I gained a conscious and developed a paternal instinct. Suddenly, I wanted to know what became of you, get to know you, and become a part of your life, and you become a part of mine._

_Unfortunately, Maleficent made it quite clear that when she said she was banishing me forever, she did mean_ forever. _If she wasn't using my old tricks and traps against me, she was using her fancy new bodyguards and spies to root me out and stop me before I even got within seeing distance of Bargain Castle._

_The salt on the wound was when she commissioned several_ un _wanted posters of me and plastered them all over the island—with a lot of artistic liberty on her part._

_So I stopped, much as it pained me, emotionally or physically, especially when I failed to notice the trip wires, pressure plates, and whatever trap it was connected to. It seems that I could never could become the lethal shadow I was after developing a conscience, and Maleficent was all too keen to abuse that._

“ _All the more proof that you're weak,” she told me in a letter once._

_So, you've either read this far, or I've just wasted a lot of time and money getting a pen, some ink, and clean paper to write this on. In the latter case, I don't blame you, and in the former case, I want to ask a huge favour of you, one that you are free to deny me:_

_I want to talk to you, face-to-face, for an hour._

_I want to ask questions, and I want to answer your questions._

_I want to get to know you, and hopefully, you'll want to get to know me, too._

_You can have all the guards you want. You can even put up a wall between us and have us talk by telephone, like I heard they used to do with the jails over at Cruella's pre-Uniting London. You could even just have us slip notes to each other under a door, if that's what it takes._

_Just send back a letter addressed to the Isle's post office, if you you haven't just destroyed this letter. It'll find it's way to me somehow, I promise._

_Hoping you'll say yes,_

_He Who Shall Not Be Named_


End file.
